1. Technical Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to mobile stations, and more particularly, to the ability of mobile stations to concurrently support multiple data transmission services.
2. Description of Related Art
The increasing technological developments within the area of wireless telecommunications have greatly increased the number of services which may be provided between a mobile station (MS) and a base station (BS). As the variety of services available from the mobile station continue to develop, mobile stations have acquired and are continuing to develop the ability to support several different types of services. These services include real time (RT) services, such as speech and video, and non real time (NRT) services, such as file transfers.
Problems arise in providing support for these varied services at the mobile station due to the different requirements of each service. For example, one service may require a bit error rate (BER) of 10xe2x88x923 with low flexibility in the service delay requirements, while a second service may require a much higher bit error rate but have lower delay requirements. Ideally, each of these services are simultaneously supported by a single mobile station.
One solution to providing simultaneous services from a single mobile station involves creating a new physical channel for each service every time a new service becomes available to the mobile station. This may be undesirable from a mobile station complexity point of view.
Another solution involves multiplexing each of the services together onto the same channel and utilizing a single code on the channel. However, this solution is quite inefficient. In a situation where two services have greatly differing bit error rate requirements, the coding, interleaving and power control for the two services must be performed in such a way that the service requiring the strongest requirements is supported. Thus, when time multiplexing a first service onto the same channel with the second service having substantially higher requirements, a Quality of Service (QoS) in terms of the bit error rate for the first service is unduly high resulting in lost spectrum efficiency for the mobile station. On the other hand, if the coding, interleaving and power control are performed in accordance with the needs of the lower requirement service, the Quality of Service required for the higher requirement service will never be achieved, resulting in major service degradation.
Another problem with mobile stations providing multiple services involves the mapping of variable rate data services onto a single physical channel. For example, if the data rates of different services vary independently of each other, the transmissions from the mobile station could be coordinated in such a manner that the total transmission rate does not exceed a predetermined level.
Thus, a need has arisen for the development of a technique enabling the utilization of multiple services with varying system requirements from a single mobile station that provides optimal operating conditions for each of the multiple services and further provides the ability to control variable transmission rates,.
The present invention overcomes the foregoing and other problems with the method for processing multiple data services over a communications link between a mobile station and a base station. Initially, a RLC/MAC protocol layer of the communications link processes a plurality of radio bearer services. The data within the radio bearers is separated into a plurality of data blocks. The separated data blocks are combined with other data blocks from services having substantially similar Quality of Service requirements into a transmission block for transmission on a single logical channel. The number of data blocks per transmission block is variable. The generated transmission blocks are then transmitted over a single logical channel.
The data blocks within the transmission blocks may be prioritized such that high priority data blocks are transmitted prior to lower priority data blocks. This allows the transmission of certain types of data blocks at a higher transmission rate without actually altering the transmission rate of the single logical channel. Furthermore, the transmission of transmission blocks may be scheduled such that the output power and/or transmission rate of the transceiver generating the transmission blocks remains below a selected predetermined level.